Why I know Jennifer Lawrence will ride out the nude photos storm

Jennifer Lawrence is strong and resilient - she'll have no problem riding out
the nude photo storm, says Celia Walden, who interviewed the Hollywood
actress

By Celia Walden

3:42PM BST 01 Sep 2014

“I look at Kristen Stewart now,” Jennifer Lawrence told me, over a large stack of blueberry pancakes back in January 2012, “and I think: ‘I would never want to be that famous.'”

Hard luck, Jennifer. Because nearly three years on – thanks to the Hunger Games trilogy, a Best Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook and Hollywood’s voracious appetite for sweet young blood - you are now right up there with Stewart.

Thankfully for us, 24-year-old Lawrence hasn’t scowled her way through the upper echelons of celebrity like the sullen-eyed Twilight star. Rather than winge about the ludicrous excrescences of fame – all those parties, designer frocks and comedy A-list encounters – she seems to have found them amusing in the way that every 20-something-year-old girl would if catapulted into Lawrence’s position. Which is partly why the actress has become so popular. Any gaffes (tripping over her Dior train at the Oscars and flubbing various award ceremony speeches) have been borne with insouciance and good-humour.

Today, however, Lawrence would have good reason to scowl, after graphic pictures of her began circulating on the internet on Sunday. The nude ‘selfies’ – apparently obtained from Apple’s iCloud service by an anonymous hacker who has targeted over a hundred celebrities including Kate Upton and Krysten Ritter – allegedly show the actress naked from the waist up in various locations, ranging from a dressing room to her own bedroom.

In a spectacularly cynical piece of cyber-marketing, the hacker also said that he or she “would accept PayPal donations” for a video of Lawrence. “If somebody wants it let me know how I can upload it anonymously (I don’t want the FBI over me, and you don’t wanna know how I got this video)." For peeping toms, online shopping has never been so easy.

Within hours, a spokesman for Lawrence declared this “a flagrant violation of privacy,” adding: “the authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos.”

In an industry that prefers to ride out storms in denial and certainly without comment, this rapid and straightforward confirmation that the photos are genuine is surprising. It is also entirely in keeping with Lawrence’s unflinching character.

The Kentucky-born station-wagon driving surfer-girl that I interviewed all those months ago may have been naïve about how deeply her life would be affected by celebrity - but she was no lily-livered ingénue. There was a pleasing rashness there that – although arguably partly to blame for her current predicament – differentiated her from her automaton Hollywood counterparts: the starlets who will trade in their personalities for fame, because that’s what they’ve been told they must do.

Jennifer Lawrence starring in American Hustle

During our Glamour interview, Lawrence swore – largely at herself for swearing after having been told not to by her "people" – inhaled platefuls of carbs and sent up the bratty behaviour of fellow stars.

“When I get gifted these amazing things,” she laughed, “I keep thinking how funny it would be to write a letter back to, like, Christian Dior saying ‘Why would you send me a white bag? I mean I obviously don’t like white,'” Most importantly – and out of keeping with other female stars of her generation – this girl was no puritan. Asked whether she would strip off for a role, Lawrence came back with: “So far I haven’t found a film that I would love to be naked in, but I certainly never look at an actress naked in a movie and judge her. It’s a human body, which is a beautiful thing, right?”

The unchoreographed, stolen shots of Lawrence circulating online may be a very different thing indeed, but those who don’t stand in judgement over others are often the hardiest when tested themselves.

Nudity doesn’t damage, let alone end careers in Hollywood anymore. And I could quite imagine this resilient young woman – an actress Harvey Weinstein once described to me as “the real deal” – bringing the house down with some PayPal gag when she accepts her next Oscar.